& the sea between us yields its secrets
silver into pellables into sheets of sound
that bear our pain & spume & salt & Coltrane

Kamau Brathwaite, “Word Making Man”

The tides of Atlantic circulation have been the lifeblood of global modernity, carrying commodities, bodies, waste products and ideas that have enriched and nourished, but also often radically impoverished, the sites on its periphery. As the first location of “modernity” and a key location for the emergence of its various “posts,” the Atlantic basin represents a richly archaeological site for the study of the various economies — material, symbolic, and ideological — that produce contemporary global life.

This seminar investigates the productive intersections among and between these economic modes — of exchange, circulation, consumption and accumulation, broadly conceived — in the contemporary Atlantic region. We welcome papers exploring literary, filmic, artistic, political and historical economies, including possible topics like: